to those left behind
by The Crownless Queen
Summary: Five people who missed James. Or in which sometimes knowing about a death and accepting it are two different things.


**to those left behind**

 **.i(Lily).**

She feels it when James dies, a great wrenching in her heart seconds before she hears the _thump_ of his body falling.

She has no time for grief though, no time to give the man she loves more than a few thoughts of goodbye, because the monster who did this to them is still there, still after their son, and she'll be damned if she lets him take Harry away from her too.

James fought as hard as he could, and she owes it to him, to their little family to do the same.

She stands proudly in front of the man who just killed her husband and begs, not for her life but for her son's, and all the while her emotions rage inside her, just beneath the surface.

Voldemort's last mistake will be to dismiss her as 'just another Mudblood', and she will make sure of it.

She lets the green light come, and smiles, a savage, blood-thirsty twist of her lips that anyone sane would have known to hide from.

Harry will live, and that's all that matters.

(she's so sorry she'll never get to see him grow up and become the great man she knows he can be, but at least now he has a chance)

(she'll get to join James though – that has to be worth something)

 **.ii(Sirius).**

He knows James and Lily are dead long before he sees the bodies. It's in the way the air suddenly freezes in his lungs, a terrible sense of foreboding stealing his breath and stopping his heart for one impossibly long beat.

The world feels dimmer suddenly, like a damaged masterpiece when it was full of life and shining with bright colors moments before.

Nobody has to tell him that something horrible has happened. His heart already knows.

He'll never get to surprise James by jumping him from behind as Padfoot, never get to see him smile or hear him laugh again.

There won't be another panicked late night Floo call because Harry did something unexpected and a frantic James doesn't know how to deal with it, he won't get to be the fun Uncle to all of his best friend's children like they had planned.

Merlin, it's like someone ripped part of his heart out – James is gone (there's no way this terrible _knowing_ can mean anything else), and that means that Lily and Harry are probably gone too.

How could this have happened? How could Peter have told on them, how could he have been found when no one was supposed to know that he was the Secret Keeper?

Unless he wasn't _found_.

Unless _something else_ happened.

 _(losing James and Lily feels like losing his entire world, but to know that it all might have been avoided had he not tried to be_ clever _…)_

 _(that is true pain – enough pain to drive someone mad)_

 **.iii(Remus).**

He gets the news from the Prophet, like he imagines most of the Wizarding did.

He can already hear the celebrations in the distance – he had thought it was maybe for a birthday, or some kind of Muggle event he hadn't been aware of.

Turns out one of his best friends died last night, and no one thought to warn him.

Was this how far he had fallen, the proof of how little they trusted him? Have they finally realized that he truly is a monster, that he wasn't worth the time they had spent together before?

 _(had it all been a lie then, all those years spent together?)_

But Merlin – James…

Remus can't believe James is gone, and Lily along with him.

It doesn't feel real. It can't be real.

It has to be a bad joke, like the kind Sirius and James sometimes came up with before Remus himself found them plotting and told them that no, replacing the water in the showers with tar would hurt more people than it'd make them laugh, or that releasing the wild creatures Professor Kettleburn had them study in the Great Hall would create more panic than laughter.

He stays inside for the entire day, unmoving, his eyes riveted to the front page of the Daily Prophet, the photo there caught in a gruesome loop of the destroyed Potter's cottage.

 _(that image stays with him every time he closes his eyes, like he bad dream one can never shake)_

 **.iv(Minerva).**

She hears the rumors first, and she refuses to believe them.

James and Lily, dead? The prodigy boy who was always first to succeed in the spells she taught and the brilliant and headstrong girl he had pursued for years before she had even deigned look at him with anything other than contempt, dead?

Impossible. Her mind refuses to accept this as truth.

 _(her heart knows different though – no one was safe when You-Know-Who himself came to the battlefield, and Minerva herself had lost more than her fair share of loved ones to that monster masquerading as human still)_

 _(maybe that's why she refuses this particular truth – her heart knows it would break from yet another loss, especially this one)_

 **.v(Harry).**

He gets scraps and tiny bits of memories, ever since the Dementors. Most are of his mother, but some – painfully rare but always welcome, are of his father.

Feelings, mostly. Warmth, and what he thinks is love, along with teasing whispers of a man's voice.

He never gets images, no matter how much he yearns for them. He only knows his parents' faces from pictures and those terribly heart-breaking nights with the Mirror of Erised two years ago, and he wishes he could have at least one memory of his own, where he could see for himself all those little details that made them alive.

He dreams about them though, and what they could be. Small scenes of what he could have had, of the life he could have been had everything been different.

He wakes up in tears, most of the time, wisps of his dreams clinging to him like the last remnants of a warmth he lost a long time ago.

But sometimes, he wakes up with a quiet, peaceful smile on his lips, knowing that his parents loved him.

And Merlin, it's more than he ever thought he'd get.


End file.
